thefrankfurterschool

[thefrankfurterschool]

Some Notes on Trump’s “Palace Coup”

I’ve been seeing a couple of pieces circulating, speculating about the internal workings of the Trump White House. Trump kremlinologies are all well and good (some are even pretty astute), but I’d like to address – and pour some water on – those that interpret last week’s executive order on immigration as a dry-run, if not the groundwork, for a palace coup. Let me be blunt: this kind of speculation is a waste of time. Why these apocalyptic fictions are gaining any kind of traction amongst liberals and lefties likely comes down to two basic reasons: people on the left are (rightfully) scared and disoriented, and have been primed by all this muttering about Trump being a Russian Manchurian candidate to think about power in conspiratorial terms. Engaging with politics as a manifestation of subterranean conspiratorial movements isn’t actually an engagement with reality using a particular analytical frame, but recursively engaging an analytical frame until reaching a desired conclusion. If you want to see the makings of a palace coup in the Trump Administration’s Muslim, you will always find evidence of that coup. But beyond the clear epistemic problem implicit in any kind of conspiracy, looking into the entrails of the Trump Administration and finding omens of shadowy deep-state conspiracies is actively demoralizing, a recipe for demobilizing a coherent opposition before it’s even formed.

 The basic argument that unites these pieces, that the Trump administration fabricated a political crisis to distract opposition to push through a reorganization of deeper state functions, simply doesn't hold up. If Bannon et al. wanted a political crisis that would exhaust opposition and distract them from the administration’s consolidation of the National Security Counsel, they haven't done a particularly good job of it. Never mind that such a claim of knowing the precise intentions of another person is essentially unprovable, ignoring that the U.S. maintains a kill-list and utilizes special forces units that effectively operate as death squads, routinely killing civilians and mutilating the bodies of enemy combatants will become increasingly difficult, particularly as the administration inevitably accelerates the targeted killing program. Liberals who ignored (or shamefully, excused) the targeted assassination program under the Obama administration are for the first time since the end of the Bush Administration feeling some inkling of outrage at the conduct of the American state abroad, particularly if they sense a chance to make some short-term political gains. If anything, by making a widely detested figure like Bannon a permanent fixture of the NSC only heightens and increases the visibility of the contradictions between American actions and projected image. 

 Likewise, if the Trump administration was truly as skilled at managing media optics as these articles imply, why would the administration so vigorously alienate media outlets and personalities that have for the last year and a half been more than content with “impartially” reporting every vile pronouncement? Why turn an access journalism sycophant like Jake Tapper into a figurehead for “#TheResistance”? Shit, why burn the goodwill of a complete right-wing hack like Shepard Smith? The Trump administration, before even taking office, demonstrated it incapable of maintaining relationships with neutral to friendly media outfits. So to think that Trump, or Bannon, or whoever, has managed to spin an increasingly hostile media and a population that unreservedly fucking hates them (and consequently, closely observes everything the administration tries) into unwittingly doing the administration’s bidding is utterly asinine. This is little more than a negative recapitulation of liberals that saw every concession and defeat of the Obama administration as evidence of the magnificent strategy that Obama would soon launch to finally put away intransigent Republicans. This was, as it is now, little more than political fan fiction, the product of a brain addled by thrilling and/or devious political machinations they saw on Scandal. The truth is likely more mundane, if no less horrifying: Trump is a slime ball with no politics besides howling reaction, and Bannon is a monstrous white nationalist who sees in Trump an opportunity to execute on his politics. None of the ghouls in the Trump administration has given any indication that they are particularly clever or subtle, only that they are extremely committed and uncompromising in their agenda. This is, of course, a fucking nightmare. But mystifying the actions of the Trump administration by resorting to some inchoate conspiracy theory is precisely the wrong response.

Also, don’t forget, there are people – immigration lawyers and activists, constitutional lawyers, political scientists and assorted academics – who still haven’t fully unpacked the full implications of what is actually written in the immigration executive order. They're struggling to disentangle intent from sheer incompetence. Naturally, expertise is not the be-all and end-all of every discussion, but I think it's pretty telling that most of the writers sounding the alarms over a secret internal coup (that only they, of course, have been able to discern from baffled useful idiots) are essentially casual observers, dilettantes at best: Zunger is primarily an engineer at Google and Fuentes is a tech CEO and spends most of his time writing about “Startups, Data, Doing Good in the World,” whatever that means. I would caution against taking too much advice about incipient fascism (or anything else, to be honest) from anybody who writes in the laziest MBA-clichés.

The administration’s muslim ban is, in and of itself, an unqualified horror show, but we should pay attention to whatever the Department of Homeland Security is doing, but I hope nobody at this point is so naïve to blithely assume that law enforcement, whether they be CBP, NYPD, or Sheriff J.W. Pepper, necessarily follow the laws they enforce. Flagrantly illegal and racist police activity isn’t evidence of a fascist rupture within the United States government; it’s a proud American tradition.

[thefrankfurterschool]

The question of The Islamic State is not "what do we do?", but "how do we speak of them?"

As the fighters of the Islamic State continue their campaign in Iraq, another sort of campaign has seized the American and European political discourse.  Despite the Obama administration’s recent (disconcertingly) open-ended promise to degrade and contain the IS’ capabilities in the region, calls for proactive American and European involvement have continued.  A chorus of politicians and pundits from across the political spectrum, from the libertarian right, to the reanimated corpse of neoconservatism, and even the liberal left, have joined their voices in unison to declare that now is the time to cease our fucking around and act against the Islamic State.

And who could fault anybody for being frightened by the exploits of the IS?  The accounts of their behavior are truly harrowing. Details of mass executions of captured soldiers and civilians by rifle, stone, and blade abound in outlets of reputable journalism.  These stories are splashed across news feeds across the world, and are matched in their gruesomeness only by breathless tabloid journalism that tells of children brainwashed and pressed into fighting after being forced to witness and participate in acts of mass violence.

Obviously, I am not equipped to refute these reports, nor am I sufficiently paranoid to assume that the articles about the IS’ violence are the product of some insidious misinformation campaign, or even that the accounts are in any way overstated.  It sounds as if the Islamic State is a genuinely violent and cruel organization.  My only access to the bloodshed in Iraq and Syria is the same that most Americans have, and the stories are truly horrifying.  While I can’t speak to the veracity of the reporting, I can speak to how these individual stories are assigned value and assembled by pundits and politicians into a cohesive whole.

The way we discuss the IS essentially breaks one of two ways.  In more mainstream media outlets, the Islamic State is an entirely novel threat, appearing as a conventional army, but fully capable of leveraging social media for their nefarious ends.  Although they might have once been a group of loosely organized insurgents (that previous American intervention may have empowered, if not created), they are no longer a “terrorist group, but a barbaric army of terrorists”.  Simultaneously, across social media and the blogs of amateurish wonks, there is a near theological reading of the IS that has been put forward, suggesting that the IS represents the reemergence of some evil force that lies buried in the human soul, an evil like Genghis Kahn, Hitler, and Tamerlane that is “ancient, unchanging, and ever with us”.

Whatever starting point we choose, however, the conclusion is always essentially the same.  Across Iraq, the IS commits atrocities that are blasphemous to both Western secular and religious ideals.  They are equally capable of slaughtering ethnic Kurds as they are crucifying Christians who refuse to renounce their faith, all for the purpose of reviving their particular vision of a caliphate.  This toxic mix of genocidal tendencies and religious zealotry that marks the IS makes pre-War on Terror Al-Qaeda look bush-league.  Thus, the IS poses a looming existential threat to the well-being of western nations that must be dealt with posthaste.

Even in taking both of these (admittedly, schematic) positions at face value, the IS is neither entirely novel, nor are they actors in some kind of dualistic cosmology. Taped executions and mass murder are certainly not new, and the surprise expressed by some that an Islamic militant group is capable of using Twitter as effectively as anybody else not only bears the stench of racism, but is also, frankly, profoundly stupid.  Likewise, to read the IS as some purely evil force is a dangerously reductive analysis, before we even touch the bizarrely retrograde imperial ideology that animates such a statement.

The IS, or more precisely, the way western media attempts to locate and apprehend the IS in relation to the broader middle-eastern geopolitical landscape, is neither entirely novel, nor is it even all that old.  There is certainly a remobilization of the old cliché of Oriental Despotism in the coverage of IS’ attempts to provide basic infrastructure and governance in the territory they occupy.  American and European media outlets possess a morbid fascination with the IS’ ability to create some semblance of stability through coercion and mass violence where liberal Western ideals failed so spectacularly.  It seems when we speak of the IS’ dreams and aspirations, we are, in fact, actually giving voice to the collective nightmare of the Western political conscience; the universal humanist ideals we hold dear, may be, in fact, particular to a small group of Enlightenment intellectuals.

There is, however, a secondary, more immediate valence to the way we speak of the IS.  This secondary subtext is perhaps best demonstrated in the above-cited blog post from Victor Hanson, who, by mapping the IS, the “medieval Taliban”, and “the primordial Tsarnaev brothers” onto Tolkien’s orcs, has resurrected and recapitulated the medieval cliché and analytical tool that characterized both popular and neoconservative discourses at the beginning of the War on Terror.  Hanson remakes the IS, not in the image of militants attempting to form a state, but as innately violent, unruly medieval subjects, who, by definition, are and forever will be non-state actors*.  According to the “medieval” characterization, the IS is not just ideologically incompatible with modern values, but entirely incompatible with (post)modernity.  The IS and its fighters can thus be considered exempt from the recognition and considerations afforded to conventional political and military arrangements.

Sadly, this is tired ground in international relations.  It’s precisely the same analytic framework that drove the run-up to the last American intervention in Iraq, as well as the moral basis upon which torture and targeted killings could be legally justified.  Perhaps its unsurprising that the remaining holdouts of neo-conservatism will push the same line they’ve always pushed, even after being largely disavowed by the American political establishment.  What is remarkable, however, is that the same pseudo-historicizing logic of delegitimization that explicitly underwrites neocon analysis of IS is implicitly in play in the more “respectable” explications of the IS. 

While it may lack the ugly racial subtext Hanson’s orc metaphor carries, does the outrage at IS crucifixions and stonings not come with the righteous indignation that these are tactics held over from some barbaric, pre-modern time?  Likewise, isn’t our fear of the IS’ theocratic aspiration articulated as a threat to a return to an imagined European dark ages, rather than a return to the historic, classical Islam?  Even in the relatively restrained rhetoric of the State Department, there is a peculiar evocation of the nomenclature of early twentieth century European colonialism in insisting to refer to the IS as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  It is not that the IS represents some profound failure to be modern, it is that we cannot discuss IS without relegating them to some imagined pre-modern time.  Ironically, the rhetorical framework we use in discussing the IS is itself a remnant of the Euro-American past, rather than the reemergence of the Middle-Eastern past.

Although we now look upon the Bush administration’s bluster and cowboy politics as an unfortunate mistake of the recent past, we are again speaking their language.

* A deeper discussion on this juridical significance of this can be found in Bruce Holsinger’s “Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and The War on Terror”.